Saturday, November 27, 2010

The Coverup Is Always Worse Than The Crime

It was George Orwell, who first coined the term "memory hole," in his classic novel 1984. For Winston, the book's main character, his full-time job with the Ministry of Truth is to rewrite history, spiriting away the inconvenient details.Someone like Winston appears to be hard at work behind the scenes at Fox Nation.This morning, an article and comment thread related to a piece of satire the site and its readers took seriously, went missing.The page was preserved through Google Cache, but the comment thread, which showed dozens of loyal Fox readers reacting to a joke story from The Onion as if it were real, is gone.

Some of the comments were preserved by Raw Story in the story below.

For a news outlet to retain credibility, standard industry procedure dictates that reporters and editors not only correct mistakes, but acknowledge them as well. Fox Nation had done neither at time of this writing.It's not a good move for Fox, which was savagely and very publicly mocked by other major online media for passing off satire as if it were actual news.In the wake of such humiliation, the site's editors can expect to face even greater scrutiny from the online community, especially after vanishing their embarrassment without so much as an explanation or retraction."

Original report follows...

Fox News' opinion website Fox Nation and their readers don't seem to know satire when they see it.The Fox News sister site re-posted a joke from the satirical website The Onion Friday about President Barack Obama sending a 75,000-word e-mail to the the entire nation. At no point does Fox Nation note that the story is a satire.The Onion story joked that Obama had "reached the end of [his] rope" and sent out the "rambling" stream of consciousness e-mail that addressed everything from the war in Afghanistan to his live-in mother-in-law.The story goes on to say that the fake Obama e-mail was 27 megabytes and 127 printed pages.If Fox Nation knows the story is a joke, they aren't letting on, and many of the comments on the post treat the story as if it were actual news.

"It is really sad that in a time of crisis in this country with troops on foreign soil the economy lack of jobs and now N. Korea once again rattling their saber we have a President sitting in the White House that by what I read in the email is utterly losing it," Goofy1954 wrote. "We can not afford to have him in the White House at such a critical time."

"I must not be on his email list, I didn't get it," another commenter said. "Oh well, I didn't miss anything. He thought running the country was just giving speeches to throngs of people."

"If this story is correct, that he did send out this email, it is very concerning about his current state of mental health," Famnp worried. "I am surprised he would be allowed to send something like this out and if he is not functioning very well why there isn't some attention being paid to his current state."

"This should be enough to have him removed from office immediately......he is now the highest security risk to this nation," Obamababble observed.

"What you are seeing folks is the human unraveling and development of a self-delusional, irrational madman becoming unhinged. Can anyone say Hitler?" Mmttomb3 asked."

I guess it's not so surprising that Fauxsters couldn't figure out it was an Onion piece. This has happened many times in the past. It's the same thing as them forwarding idiotic crap round and round on email lists. It's absolute truth that these people have some sort of short circuit in the brain that doesn't allow them to figure out satire; they simply don't understand humor.I have no idea why this is, it simply is. Remember when they tried to copy satirical TV shows a few years bac with their "1/2 Hour News Hour"?"The 1/2 Hour News Hour was an American television news satire show on the Fox News Channel. The program presented news stories from a conservative perspective, using a satirical format pioneered by Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update, This Hour Has 22 Minutes, and The Daily Show.The first pilot aired on February 18, 2007, and the second on March 4, 2007. Fox News Channel later purchased 13 more episodes of the show, which started airing on May 13, 2007. The show was cancelled and the final episode aired on September 23, 2007."They even called it the "The Daily Show for conservatives", but it was anything but close to Jon Stewart's style. It absolutely stunk to high heaven, with most everything falling flat on it's face. It's like it was a parody of humor. Everybody involved let his ego get in the way, unfunny punchline jokes needed canned laughter and supposedly snarky bits were only mean spirited insults passed off as humor. It was total disaster because apparently people of that mindset just don't get satire, much like the Greys have no understanding of human emotion.